I said there would be pictures. Shauna and I returned to Sentinel Dome on Monday night to have some dinner, check out the moon and the fires. I was running late, and Shauna packed up the most amazing dinner with pasta, wine, and CHOCOLATE CAKE! We outlasted the ranger-led moonlight hike on the top of Sentinel Dome, and I enjoyed the food, the conversation and the scenery.

It’s no wonder that there are so many stories about being outdoors under a full moon. Everything about it screams magic. And then, when the food was eaten, we hiked down and checked out the Grouse Creek Fire.

It’s not nearly as impressive as it had been Sunday night, and a fire-fighter that we met at one of the pull-outs said that even Sunday paled in comparison to Saturday night when he and his hotshot crew had first lit the hillside – “a little lightin’ and fightin’” was how he put it when the wind had changed direction unexpectedly. He was so proud of what they had done, and called out one of his buddies to show us a short video of the fire. He was right to be proud. We can go ahead and put that on the list of jobs that I really could never do.

Although I brought a light-weight tripod with me, I didn’t end up setting it up for the pictures of the fire. Too lazy – although I sort of regret it now. Plus, it was difficult to tighten the mount enough and the camera kept drooping anyway, so it seemed like kind of a hassle. This is enough to get a feel for what we saw, but what I really wish is that we’d gotten some pictures earlier during the fire. Oh well – this is Yosemite. There will be other fires.

We didn’t pull back into the neighborhood until just before midnight. Good thing, because Tom was almost ready to go looking for me. I was bubbling with excitement from our little adventure, and all Tom wanted to do was go to bed. Poor guy. I sure am lucky.

Quick notes today.

1. If you haven’t been there already, you should check out MapJack.com. They have a really cool street-view map of Yosemite, and I love their interface. Click on the big picture to pan left or right, and you can move Jack around in the lower map area to explore different things. Very similar to Google Maps street view, but it seems to work a bit more smoothly for me.

At one point there was a group of us standing around the computer together joking “hey, that’s the RV I rented, hey, that’s my car…” when we panned a little left and CA cried out “OMG – that really is my car.” We checked it out from a couple of different angles and verified. Immortalized!

2. On a completely different note: There was a car fire here today that destroyed the vehicle of a Valley local. No one was injured (thankfully), and after they put the fire out, they realized that the fire was started by a stash of pine cones in the engine compartment. They suspected some squirrel had been storing food there over the winter. Many people in Yosemite end up parking their cars for a long time – so many things are within walking distance and there are public transportation options available. Still, it was a bit of a shock. Living in the mountains means that we’re used to thinking about things like loose rock, lightening, and snowstorms but so far “car fire due to rodent cache” has not really made the radar. Amazing stuff happens here.

The Deputy Superintendent of Yosemite, Kevin Cann, came to speak at the Senior Manager’s Meeting this morning about the Telegraph Fire. I’d been following the fire pretty closely, so I didn’t learn too much about the details of the fire, but there were a couple of things that I found interesting – in no particular order.

Initially, the fire was moving and spreading at a rate that reminded people of the infamous Harlow Fire in the 1961 – one of the fastest moving fires ever recorded. Fortunately, there were many fire crews in the area from the recent spate of CA fires, and those fires were mostly contained when we started, so when the call went out for resources, there were many available.

Al Golub has some amazing pictures of the fire.

Now, when they estimate the total cost of the fire, they include the cost to replant and rehabilitate the giant bulldozer lines along with the cost of the hot shot crews and the helicopters. It’s not just about fighting the fire now, there are plans in place to manage the environment afterward as well.

Good news from this afternoon’s DNC briefing…

1. Power is on in El Portal and Yosemite West and they expect to have power in the Valley by 8pm tonight, with the possibility of permanent power (rerouting lines around the burn area). This means that it wasn’t a totally stupid thing to take things out of the cooler last night and put them back in the refrigerator, and that Tom is probably enjoying a hot shower even as I type.

2. Air quality is improving: the health alert has been lifted as of today (7/30). The air quality hasn’t bothered me too much, although I’ve been avoiding running in the stuff. However, I work with a bunch of asthmatics, and they have been pulling heavily on their inhalers.

3. 140 is open again – with a CHP escort between 8am and 8pm. We don’t really use this corridor often, but the fact that they’ve opened it up again, means that the fire is unlikely to jump the road and head uphill toward our house.

4. The best news: The fire is now 40% contained (up from 20% this morning). Kenny talked to a firefighter who said that the threat to El Portal has “abated” too. I’m not sure exactly what that means, but since El Portal is directly downhill of us, if they think the threat against El Portal has diminished the threat against our neighborhood has probably also diminished.

Keep your fingers crossed that the conditions don’t change for the worst, but for now we seem to be looking pretty good.

Tom has a bunch of Telegraph fire status links on Yosemite Explorer if you want to follow the action like we have been the last few days.

On February 12, the California Native Plant Society sponsored a free wildflower walk led by Yosemite-area naturalist Michael Ross, and breaking out of our normal routines, Tom and I decided to see what it was all about. Simply amazing. It was a ‘wildflower walk’ which meant that it focused on flowers, but the thing is, if you follow a guy around for half a day who is a trained naturalist and who has been living in the Yosemite area for 30+ years you can’t help learning a little bit about birds, butterflies, wasps, caterpillars, fire ecology and a myriad of other things too.

We wandered up into the hills behind El Portal (just outside the park boundary on Hwy 140), and were treated to hillsides covered in carpets of poppies, lupine, popcorn flowers and more that Michael said was the best display he’d seen in 20+ years. He and Ann, another wildflower surveyor, and CNPS member, speculated that because of the amount of rain received last fall and the grasses which normally grow up to obscure the flowers were not as prominent.

Some highlights (hope I get the details right – please let me know if I should make corrections):

We were treated to sightings of some rare plants, including Condon’s Wooly Sunflower, and another Condon plant that grows only in a few small patches, including one just off the side of the road.

We had a few examples of how difficult it is to tell the difference between different species of flowers. For example, there are 150 species of Popcorn Flower (a small white flower) in California alone, and in order to tell them apart you need to have information like whether or not their seeds have scratch marks. The difference between Phacelia and Saxifrage genus is whether or not the style is split. Time to start learning plant parts.

Fiesta flowers, a beautiful purple flower that prefers steep shady environments, got their common name because if you pick the flower something on the back of the flower, maybe the sepals?, act like Velcro and you can stick them to your clothing.

We stopped to take a look at a Thompson’s Sedge, a rare find in this region. Like the Sequoias, this unassuming tuft of greenery also requires fire in order to thrive, and has become less rare now that we have reversed our policy of fire suppression. Michael listed a couple of other plants that are also being rejuvenated in the area due to the new wildfire management policies.

There are small predatory wasps which lays their eggs in a particular kind of caterpillar. The larvae consume the caterpillar from the inside out, ending with the vital organs, and then pupate into their adult forms. Amazingly, these wasps also have a parasitoid microscopic wasp that ride on them, and looks like a small dot with the naked eye.

Shieldleaf is part of the mustard family and the seed pods have a pleasant peppery taste and have been called “mountain wasabi”.

You can use Staghorn lichen to dye wool.

The list goes on and on.